


Like a Stone Into the Sea

by ImpishTubist



Category: Maurice (1987), Maurice - E. M. Forster
Genre: Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 06:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/548718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImpishTubist/pseuds/ImpishTubist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maurice and Alec, after the boathouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Stone Into the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** I own nothing.
> 
> Written last year for Sidney Sussex.

The letter came in the spring. 

The words on the page were garish and perverse, and they made Maurice’s head ache as he read them, so far removed were they from the world that he knew. There was a war, of that he was aware--of course he was, how could it be ignored? But it was easy to forget in their forest, his and Alec’s, where the only contact they had with the outside world was through the occasional trip into town for supplies and the post. For nearly three years it had just been the two of them, each one the only person the other saw on a daily basis; the only person he spoke to and took meals with and worked alongside.

Maurice folded up the letter, placed it in the envelope, and slipped it into his pocket.

He touched his fingers to his brow and looked to the door. The familiar worn coat and boots were gone, and he allowed a moment to himself, just for breathing. And then the world resumed.

Alec was out with the dog when Maurice went to find him.

“G’morning!” the dark-haired man called when he spotted his companion, jubilant, as he was likely to get when the shooting had been good. He traipsed through the tall grass to greet Maurice, the dog trotting at his heels.

“Afternoon, really,” Maurice said. “Have you been out here all day?”

He was delaying the inevitable with idle chat; Alec, not one for words when actions served just as well--if not better--saw through the ruse. The smile slipped from his face.

“You’ve had your orders.”

“It wasn’t unexpected,” Maurice said bracingly. Alec, who would never receive his orders, gave a brisk nod. He had willingly lost himself to the greenwood, as eager to disappear as England was to be rid of him. He had passed a night with a man above his station, missed his boat to the Argentine, and scorned a baptism. No one had pursued him when he melted into the greenwood and never resurfaced; no one had wanted him to return.

“True enough, I s’pose.”

“Alec,” Maurice said, and kissed him. Alec’s eyes were dark when he drew away.

“I know.”

\----

There were kisses, frantic and greedy, stolen in the shadows and out in broad daylight. Each drank the other in - panting, desperate, helpless - as though he could consume him; as though they could become one. They drifted on waves of bliss amid sheets steeped in sweat, until the sun rose high enough to filter through their window. Maurice kissed Alec’s darkened skin, tasting salt and sunshine and the rough calluses that came from a life of work. He traced his tongue from the back of Alec's neck to the base of his spine to the patch of skin high on his right thigh that made him moan and curl his toes.

They breathed and gasped and moved in tandem.

They lived a life of the in-between - before the war; after Penge.

They loved.

They worked.

They waited.

Maurice left; Alec did not.

The birds continued to sing in Maurice's absence, and the sun to rise and the breeze to stir the grass. Alec found that he was furious at such constants in nature, and couldn’t fathom why. Words and thoughts were Maurice’s area; all he knew was that the tranquility of their island in the greenwood seemed cruel now that Maurice wasn’t there.

He wasn’t sorry when the greenwood started to fade and die.

\----

There were letters, vague and empty, the words brief and clipped because both men knew other eyes would be gracing the pages. The stiff papers upon which Maurice’s letters home were written went soft with the number of times that Alec read them, as though each new perusal would squeeze new meaning from the slanting letters and splotches of ink. Some had started to tear along the folds, worn completely through with the constant use. The ones that he didn't carry in his breast pocket were locked away in a wooden box under their –  his – bed, and Alec tried not to think that, someday, that might be all he had left of Maurice. A box of letters that said nothing at all, and memories he could share with no one else.

\----

There was a Maurice who went to war.

There was a Maurice who returned.

They weren’t quite the same, and the Maurice-who-returned knew he was not the Maurice-from-before. And yet it worked, because the man he returned to was not the Alec-from-before, and the greenwood he had left stayed behind in the past. He returned to encroaching neighbors and a vanishing forest, and their beautiful isolation was starting to give way, coming apart at the very seams.

“Hello, Alec,” he whispered in the morning, still getting used to the feel of it on his tongue again after having gone so long with it unsaid. His companion unfurled his limbs, reminiscent of a cat, and his lazy smile was just as content.

“Maurice.”

And with one word, his world was set right again.

\----

Alec missed the greenwood, now that Maurice was there to share it with him. His companion had returned; their peace had not, even as the war ended and soldiers came home.

The world rejoiced.

Alec mourned.

But Maurice was beside him once again, and that eased the ache.

“How long will we stay here?” he asked one night under a floating sea of stars. He caught his companion off-guard with the question, and it was seldom that he could accomplish that. It seemed always that Maurice was ahead of him, in thought and in class, but neither of those mattered in the greenwood. And when Maurice looked at him, his face was open; his expression, naked. Alec sucked in a breath; this was seldom, too, seeing Maurice without the mask.

“Forever, I should think,” he said in a thick voice. “If that’s to your liking, of course.”

And Alec, better with actions than he was with words, showed Maurice that the idea was acceptable, indeed.

\----

There came gentle rains to their fading greenwood, summer showers that created a shimmering veil over the whole of their land. Alec would stand on the porch at the front of their cottage and watch these rains, calculating with his trained eye the amount of water their plants could hold before it became detrimental to them; cataloging what game would be chased away by the storms and what game would not. It was tenuous, this life on the fringe, and they lived by each mood of the weather and every turn of the seasons.

It was a fate that they gladly embraced.

And now and again, when they were on the verge of autumn and the chill in the air made itself known at the tip of his nose, Alec would fold his arms across his chest and hunch his shoulders, his mind transported years and miles away by the weather. Sense-memory, called forth whenever the late afternoon skies were a blend of grays and the rains were just this side of uncomfortable. He recalled those gut-wrenching nights spent waiting for Maurice in the boathouse, the memories softened by time and the knowledge that his waiting had not been in vain.

And sometimes Maurice, feeling bold, would come up behind Alec while he watched the rain and thought of the boathouse - and the other path their lives might have taken - and slip his arms around Alec’s middle.

“All right, Alec?” he would murmur, his lips skimming the shell of Alec’s ear. His companion’s mouth would curve into a smile at these words, and his answer would escape on a puff of condensation from chapped lips, swirling in the air around them.

“All right, Maurice.”

\----

Time passed.

The dog aged and died; a new one took his place.

Every season added lines to their faces; calluses to their hands. The summer sun was unrelenting; the winter months, brutal and cruel. Spring was joyous; Alec loved the autumn. There were days without words; there were days when there weren’t enough hours for all they wanted to say. They had few friends and no visitors.

Life went on.

\----

They were old, Maurice realized one day, and said as much to Alec.

Alec drove home his stroke, splitting the wood in two with a deft blow of his axe, and paused to look at his friend. His tanned brow was slick with sweat, and he swiped the back of his hand across it before giving a slow smile.

“Are we?” he asked.

There had been a time, too long ago, when Maurice would have slid his hands along the stubbled jaw and kissed his companion, out here among the trees. But the wilderness that had been their refuge had been chipped away in the years since the war, the government stamping out and regulating every wild part of their island until there was nothing for it but to exist in this half-life, where the only means of escape left to them were in the confines of their house. Alec was not one who should have been caged, and Maurice worried for him. He grew concerned about his friend being stifled; the light behind his eyes snuffed out as their greenwood was erased.

“No,” Maurice answered. “No, only me. Never you.”

Alec smiled, indulging, and Maurice found himself decades and miles away in an instant - back in the boathouse, clinging to the under-gamekeeper, drowning in his dark-haired beauty and his blazing kisses.

The boathouse was gone, but the under-gamekeeper remained--a little older, perhaps, and a little softer, but unmistakably the same. He could pass, easily, for his younger self.

Maurice knew the opposite was true for him.

“I wonder, Alec,” he said softly, “how is it you’ve not aged, whereas I seem to gain lines on my face with each passing day.”

“‘Not aged’? Must be goin’ blind, Maurice. I’m as grey now as my old man was when I was a boy.”

“Don’t say that.” Maurice allowed a small indulgence then, and touched his fingertips to his friend’s jaw. Alec ducked his head slightly, leaning into the touch, and looked up at him through his lashes.

“I do believe, Alec, that you will remain forever.”

Alec took the hand from his face and tangled their fingers together.

“Only so long as you do, Maurice.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story draws heavily on the Terminal Note in _Maurice_. The setting is based loosely on the [unpublished epilogue ](http://devo79.dreamwidth.org/2053.html), and this is also where the title comes from.
> 
> I’ve tentatively assumed for the purposes of this fic that the novel finishes up sometime in 1913; the Military Service Act, which specified that single men between the ages of 18 and 41 were liable to be called up for military service, was not enacted until 1916. Hence, the initial three years of relative peace for Alec and Maurice.


End file.
